The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
As user's graphic representation, avatar has been quite popular in virtual world. However, most existing avatar systems are static, and few of them are driven by text, script, or voice. Some other avatar systems use graphics interchange format (GIF) animation, which is a set of predefined static avatar image playing in sequence. In recent years, with the advancement of computer vision, camera, image processing, etc., some avatar may be driven by facial expression. However, existing systems tend to be computation intensive, requiring high-performance general and graphics processor, and do not work well on mobile devices, such as smartphones or computing tablets. Moreover, existing systems do not support or have very limited support for users to interact with the animation.